Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company

Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company is an American tobacco manufacturer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, best known for its production of the premier Natural American Spirit cigarette brand. The company was founded in 1982. It is owned by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, which acquired the company in 2002 and has been operating it since that time as a division of its Reynolds American.

Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company was founded by Bill Drake, who had published The Cultivator's Handbook of Marijuana, Robert Marion, an acupuncture student at the Kototama Institute in Santa Fe, and Chris Webster, a Santa Fe Realtor. Drake had written his second book, The Cultivator's Handbook of Natural Tobacco, and began cultivating a strain of Nicotiana rustica a friend had found on the San Juan Pueblo. The men began mixing surplus bulk leaf tobacco from North Carolina and wild-grown rustica in the basement of Marion’s rented house. Startup investments came from Edward Wikes, a plumbing contractor, Robert Wolf, an oil rig roughneck, and Philip Naumburg, an heir to the Elkan Naumburg fortune. Drake purchased a Thomas Nast caricature of a Native American chief smoking a volcano for $250 and began using it as the company logo.

After discovering Drake and Marion had been wasting funds on their “alternative lifestyle”, the board of directors and company investors took control of the company. Wolf became the company’s president and began marketing the product to retail outlets on Indian Reservations. The company moved into the basement of the adobe Gross Kelly warehouse building in Santa Fe’s downtown rail yard.

In 1986, the company's board of directors hired Robin Sommers, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania who had been a subscription data specialist for Newsweek and Esquire in Greenwich Village before briefly running the Ice Palace nightclub on Fire Island. Sommers, who had paid for one of Drake’s experimental tobacco crops in 1981, implemented a direct-to-consumer advertising strategy, beginning by targeting New Age readers with coupon advertisements in the East West Journal, Rolling Stone, and the Utne Reader. Sommers commissioned a New York City graphic artist to design a new art deco logo. In 1987, the company made $88,000 in sales.

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